After four terrific DS adventures, Professor Layton has finally made its way to Nintendo's latest handheld. Originally released in Japan 18 months ago as a launch title, the wait for one of Level-5's finest franchises - a gentle point-and-click adventure crammed with clever brainteasers and deceptive puzzles - has most certainly been worth it.

Layton's latest journey takes him and his apprentice Luke to a tourist city under siege by a masked gentleman performing miracles on its residents.

Of course, things are never quite what they seem as Layton's childhood friends are dragged into the picture, with the adventure jumping between bustling city streets and his teenage past in a sleepy rural village that holds a powerful archaeological find.

Professor Layton has always boasted strong production values, and this 3DS installment gives the series a fresh lick of paint. Stylised, polygonal figures replace the character sprites of old, and each scene is now constructed out of cardboard-like buildings positioned at different 3D depths, giving it the feel of a school diorama.

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While it might sound a little crude, the outcome with the 3D cranked up is sublime, and is some of the most effective we've seen on the system to date.

The way you investigate the environment has also changed; instead of mindlessly poking every pixel in search of hint coins, you now have to move a cursor across the bottom screen. You're effectively still scanning the environment's every nook and cranny for highlighted elements, but exploration feels more satisfying and less forced than before.

While there have been tweaks to presentation, puzzles feel the same as they always have. Which is an excellent thing; the series prides itself on trials that initially bamboozle the player but often have a neat trick or red herring, and make you feel particularly smart for uncovering them.

While approaches to puzzles in earlier instalments often over-relied on a particular style or theme, the selection here feels very balanced, offering a fine blend of riddles, spot-the-differences, contradictory statements, mental arithmetic and much more. Their difficulty is pitched so that regardless of your ability, practically every one initially appears difficult, but the solutions are often within your reach.

Again, the same niggles from previous Professor Layton titles also apply here. Very occasionally, the wording of some questions isn't always clear and can require multiple re-reads, or in a worse case scenario, still don't make sense at all, meaning you brute force your way through rather than attempt to solve it properly.

It introduces some puzzle-based confrontations within the story itself. While these are few and far between and offer some interesting twists on conventional tricks - like making a grid add up to the same number from any angle or finding the ball under a cup - we found them to be poorly implemented and too obtuse to solve, and again, require you try and try again until the game eventually hands you the answer, which is never satisfying.

Also, the introduction of polygonal 3D sees the adventure occasionally shift from point-and-click to experiment with different perspectives. The opening kicks off with a brief horseback chase, but most interestingly a chapter later on has you explore caves from a top-down perspective. While this has its own challenges to overcome and is initially a welcome respite from the game's usual pace, it ultimately isn't as satisfying to solve and you're soon itching to return to traditional puzzles.

As before, there are mini-games to enjoy tucked away in the menu. These are fun, supplementary time killers that pad out the game's content, with story exploration rewarding you with new puzzles for a robot trapped in a maze, or tricks to help a rabbit rejoin the circus.

Not that these are needed to bulk out the package anyway; the adventure itself is lengthy and feels wholesome, yet its puzzle-laden formula works perfectly for snack-size playing on the move, and also offers a free downloadable puzzle each day for a year if you want to keep playing until next year's release.

Its fascinating story and well-balanced array of puzzles means Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask is probably the best outing in the series since the ground-breaking original, and the new approach to visuals once again reminds you of the system's now forgotten selling point; its terrific 3D screen.